Atari Disk Unfix
I own an Atari 130XE and a 1050 disk drive. I recently purchased the
game Summer Games, which
worked perfectly when I played it. Then I used
a DOS 2.5 utility called DISKFIX.COM. One of the choices in this
program was VERIFY DISK, so I thought I should use it to make sure the
disk contained no bad sectors or files. While it was verifying, the
computer flashed the message BAD LINK IN FILE 13-DELETING. When I ran
the game again, the gymnastics event didn't work. Any suggestions on
how I might recover the file?

M. Roberts

The DISKFIX utility which comes with
DOS 2.5 is a very powerful
utility, which tries very hard to recover all the files that it can.
The reason it didn't work in this case is most likely due to copy
protection. The copy-protection schemes used on many commercial disks
often involve changing the sector link information on the disk.
Apparently, DISKFIX thought that your disk was scrambled, and it did
its best to correct the link information. If you write to the
manufacturer of your game, perhaps they can suggest a way to recover
the lost file. Disks don't get
scrambled very often. When they do,
it's usually because a file wasn't closed after it was opened for
writing. Unless you're experienced with disk programming, you should
use
disk utilities only as a last resort. Caution is particularly important
if you're trying to repair a commercial disk. If possible, it's best to
make a copy of the disk and run the utility on the copy rather than the
original. If the utility does something unexpected, you'll at least be
no worse off than when you started.